Month: July 2016

If Marcy had written the time down wrong, he’d send her packing this time for sure. As if beating his way across town in rush hour traffic weren’t enough annoyance without having to wait outside a bodega in the sweltering heat with the smell of warm cabbage and liverwurst and stale mop water drifting out each time the door opened. The handles of the sample boards were biting into the palms of his hands and he shifted them for the umpteenth time.

George squinted at the building across the street, resenting his client for going with a row house instead of a condo. A doorman would let a respectable designer wait in an air conditioned lobby. He’d be perched on the ubiquitous chrome and leather mid century chair, checking emails on his phone and spending a little more time on Facebook than he could ever admit to himself.

As the potpourri of the bodega hit him anew, he cursed the makers of sample boards for not fitting the handles with a flange of soft rubber. Could you get a blood clot in your fingers from having your circulation pinched?

Finally he ground his teeth at the obstructionists in congress who’d spent thirty years standing in the way of true environmental reforms. Surely it was hotter today than July ought to be. Bastard republicans.

Then a black car slowed in front of him, the door swung open, and his client stepped out into the heat. Like an elf queen from a Peter Jackson trilogy, she was tall and elegant, all flowing white folds and corrugated blond tresses. It was rumored among the know-almost-nothing People magazine set that she hated Blanchett for getting the role, but George knew that during a year of the epically long filming of the series she’d already committed herself to The House of Blue Leaves at the Walter Kerr – a venue and play she was mysteriously sentimental about.

She gave him a radiant smile.

“My apologies would hardly be adequate, so I will spare us both the awkwardness of suffering through them.” She stepped forward and took a few sample boards from him before he could protest. Giving him a fond smile, she said, “Ah, love, you look positively wilted.”

Before he could respond, she’d turned on her heels and was drifting across the street, so ethereal with each languid, ballerina-like step that it occurred to him the only accessory she was short of was a celestial nimbus. It also passed through his mind that she’d artfully managed to suggest apologies were in order without actually extending one. He ought to dislike her for it a bit, but in truth it just increased his respect. She was a master of chess.

He hastened across the street, and despite the fact he was almost six feet tall, he couldn’t help but feel a little like a hobbit as his eyes darted back and forth to spy a break in traffic.

She paused in the foyer and he watched her, shuffling the sample boards she’d handed back to him while she unlocked the door. Turning with a long alligator smile stretched out under her shades, she said in a rapt whisper, “Can you hear them?”

Tilting an ear to listen for rats or hissing gas pipes, he lowered the samples and his attache onto the dusty marble floor. His eyes moved over the moldings and the faded paper. It was dim in the house after the glare of the street.

She removed her shades slowly, the grin tightening into a secretive smile, lips drawing in like a moonflower in the sun.

“These walls have so many stories,” she whispered. “How do we paint them?”

He paused. There was no doubt that they had discussed colors a week ago in his studio. She’d been firm about brightening up the place. They had discussed the merits of peach, which she loved, but which she also found terrifying. He had a clear recollection of her rising and moving to stand at his window, holding back the sheers with one long-boned hand while she studied the street. He’d been mesmerized by the light bouncing off her diamonds.

Turning from the window suddenly, she’d revealed the complexity of her feelings about peach. “My grandmother. The darling. She loved it as I do, but she died in a room covered in peach roses. They smothered her, I always felt. Cruel really.”

That afternoon he’d thought not for the first time that she deserved awards for being the perfect dramatist in real life. He’d once watched her debate the merits of two salad dressings with so much pathos he’d almost cried into his two o’clock martini.

Today, in the present, sweat pooling at the small of his back, he cautioned, “Well, if we don’t paint, fixing some of the water damage will be tricky.”

Hanging her shades from the opening of her white blouse, she frowned at him.

“Oh, we’re painting this fucker,” she said.

“Oh, yes. Oh, good.”

She caressed the newell post lovingly. “I was just feeling sentimental.”

He’d waited his entire career for a woman like this to walk into his office. It was like Mary Astor stepping into Bogart’s grimy set of rooms, spinning wild tales about her missing kid sister. He couldn’t remember the names of anyone in The Maltese Falcon except for Sam Spade, but he felt like this was his own screwy version of the story. A man labors faithfully but humbly at his craft, just keeping the landlord at bay with a little luck and sometimes his personal savings, until one day a dame walks in and changes everything.

Nothing else about the analogy worked. He didn’t want to peel off her stockings, he wanted to see her wallpaper stripped. And she wasn’t weaving tales to walk away with a jewel-incrusted statue, although they had discussed on the first meeting a vitrine to house her Tonys and Oscars and the Grammy. This was actually happening to him – his first real celebrity client – and somehow she made it all seem like a sequence from a movie. There were times when her accounts of interiors past were so gilded yet raw he wondered if Truman Capote were beaming down on her from whatever heaven existed for hateful genius bastards.

He smiled to think how much Marcy failed to overlap the rest of the similarities. While she was as much a girl Friday as he deserved, she’d never enter stage left after his each meeting, perching on the corner of his desk, reminding him not to get caught up in spider webs. Rather, she moved about his office clumsily, Swiffering up fabric lint while holding back sneezes, asking not one question about what it was like to help a living legend design her home.

One day he’d not been able to stand it. “Aren’t you curious in the least about what she’s like?”

Entering bills onto the laptop at her desk, she peered at him through the doorway that connected their offices. She shoved her glasses up into her head, making her bangs poke up and out like a hairdo from the eighties.

“She seems nice?”

He’d rolled his eyes. “She’s more than nice, Marcy! She exudes glamour. She’s old school. Her every move is a poem. Her vocabulary is Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and Tony Kushner. She doesn’t step through space like we mere mortals, she floats through time like the heroines that exist in books, waiting only to be read again to live anew, each time as fresh as the last.”

Marcy blinked at him, pinched her nose.

He stood, “She is the fucking mother of all ether and substance! She is a goddess!”

Marcy was having none of it. “So long as this check don’t bounce.”

He’d been forced to close the door to his office then, unable to imagine not killing Marcy. It was like she’d perfected nonchalance simply to drive him nuts. By the time she knocked on the glass to let him know she was heading out with the deposits, he’d forgiven her her trespasses against the actress. He needed Marcy. She knew his office like it was her own kitchen layout and her wife had benefits at her job, which meant he could afford to keep her on even after the meager raise he’d managed the year before.

To soften the tension still lingering in the office, he’d popped his head out before she got on the elevator. “If you want to grab us some macarons from the bakery out of petty cash, I’ll dust off the French press while you’re at the bank.”

She paused and he thought, ‘If she says she could take macarons or leave them, I’ll throw a potted succulent at her head.’ But then she nodded and gave him the thumbs up before stepping onto the lift.

They walked the house again.

She paused in the kitchen, frowning at the ceiling fan. “There are times when I think we should get an architect after all.”

He nodded, “I definitely think that has merits.”

Not for the first time, she explained her reservations. “The last one took me for a ride, you understand. I just can’t be hurt like that again. It was devastating.”

George found himself wanting to lean against the countertop, to put his cheek into the palm of his hand. It felt like a monologue was brewing.

But goddesses are fickle creatures and she merely turned away from the room with a little shrug. “Who’m I kidding? I hate cooking.”

They took the little back stairs up to the second floor. He reminded her that he’d have to consult with an engineer about taking the wall out between two bedrooms. He almost suggested they revisit the architect, then thought better of it.

She stood at the center of the room, hugging herself despite the humidity of the house. “So long as you handle it yourself. I don’t want this thing to balloon into a big deal.”

Tilting her head, she said to him, “I know it is a big deal, you understand. I love this house. But I just can’t have the renovations devolve into some miserable ass table read in a play with too many characters. I’d like to think of this project as something intimate.”

He nodded.

“You know, I never told you why I really came to you.”

He found that he was hugging himself, unconsciously mirroring her.

“I thought you went to a party at the Weinstein’s place and you saw my work there.”

Shelby Weinstein was the closest thing to ‘arriving’ that had happened to him before the actress. It was a lucky break, as they would say in show biz parlance. Shelby had dropped out of a design class they took together years before, opting for a degree in accounting instead. Twenty years later she was handling a client list that was like a who’s who of the theater world and this close to firing her interior designer when Facebook, by whatever creepy mechanism the internet uses to connect human dots, suggested she friend George Resnick, her old, very much forgotten school chum.

The actress shook her head. “Not entirely. Shelby’s place is lovely, don’t get me wrong.”

He waited.

She shrugged, “Well, the short story is that I need this to go smoothly. Drama is my calling professionally. I would live and die by that sword. But at home I’ve learned I want things to be soft, easy. Shelby said you took the blows. No matter how maddening the contractors were or how much the architect fought her on things, you kept it humming.”

It came back to him then, the way Shelby’s project had teetered close to ruin every day for two months that felt like ten years. He recalled the heartburn, like nothing he’d ever felt before. A night at the hospital while they ran tests and eventually proved that he hadn’t suffered a heart attack. Marcy scrambling into the hospital room the next morning with a shopping bag from Duane Reade, feeding him omeprazole with a ginger ale; putting a muffin in his attache and telling him to eat it in exactly a half hour; washing a stain out of his neck tie in the sink and patting it dry with a paper towel; walking with him all the way to the subway, reading out his emails to him – only the important ones; shouting over the turnstile at the station, “Go get em, chief.” He’d walked through that day in a daze and when he got back to his apartment, he’d wept into a pint of ice cream while watching The Good Wife. While he kept Shelby’s project humming, his body began to fall apart from the strain.

Only later, when the photographs of her project came back for the website, did he feel some repayment for the stress. It couldn’t be accounted for in the monies that passed into his bank account. That had been nice – paying rent in advance for once, finally getting the rugs at his place cleaned – but the money had felt like nothing special when weighed against that night in the hospital. Staring up into the blackness of a turned off television, he’d been held captive between two impulses: to unpack his life and figure out how to make it easier and to merely ignore it and hope that a little vacation at the end of the project would suffice. Yet on the day he uploaded the pictures of Shelby’s house, he had at last found a modicum of comfort. The way the sunlight struck her statue of a Hindu priest in the courtyard – the placement of which was one of the only things no one had argued about – had given him just one sweet teaspoon of joy. Just enough for that moment.

The actress was studying him.

“I need someone who can take all the hits, George. My life’s a wreck just now – I wouldn’t dream of telling you all the particulars. Still, if you can make this whole thing feel like a dream on my end. A happy dream.”

He ought to run.

The light shifted in the room and without thinking he reached up and took the wrappings off the chandelier. The crystals, opened up to the world like Venus rising from the sea, cast hundreds of rainbow shards over the walls, the ceiling and the floor. He took a breath.

“I am your servant,” he said. He’d wanted it to sound courtly and perhaps a little funny, but he felt foolish the moment he heard it aloud.

[A writing I found on my computer from a couple of years ago, inspired by female punk bands and a few inside jokes with my bestie that came from laughing at the wrong parts in The Vagina Monologues.]

It was Vic’s idea to wear the cone hats on stage. When she saw the others hesitate, she said, “Only for the first set.”

Carrie laughed right out loud. “The first song, maybe.” For her part, Jen could not be moved to look up from the latest issue of Blender.

As always, she resented their doubts. It was always been her thing to come up with fresh gimmicks and their thing to shoot them down, if only for a while. The debates were usually short and eventually – after days of her freeze treatment – the girls would relent. She held up her drawing to them again.

Carrie howled with laughter, almost setting her hair on fire while lighting a smoke.

Vic stalked to the back of the bus, threw herself over her bed, and placed a call to Florida to vent the indignity. Her mom, juicing something and so talking loudly over the whirring blades, said, “You always wind up in a huff, Victoria, and in the end, they always agree to some version of your idea. And they’re usually good ideas.”

Vic bristled, “What do you mean ‘usually’? Wasn’t the cat paws on the Cesarean Section tour my idea? Didn’t Rollingstones say, and I quote, ‘Vic Legend, styling the band as a rogue box of kittens, is as mad a cow as ever.’?” She paused. “I mean, the mad cow reference made sense back then.”

Her mother seemed doubtful. “Hon, I think he was just calling you a cow. Remember, that was the year you went off your meds and started comfort eating again.”

Jen walked past, opening a pack of toilet paper, “Didn’t he also say, ‘Always one to add more icing, Legend gets the outside of hard rock just right, even when her lyrics veer into maudlin pop cliches.'”

“Fuck Loder and his ugly fucking, fuck face,” Vic shrieked.

Her mother just laughed. “Don’t let Jen get to you so much, Victoria. Put her on for a sec.”

The older woman’s voice was as easy to hear in the bus as if they were standing in her sunny, pastel Miami kitchen; the slender drummer with the sleepy eyes was already reaching for the phone. “Hello, Mrs. Hockman.”

“Jennifer, are you giving my girl heartburn again?”

Jen said, “Ha, ha, Mrs. Hockman, Vic’s giving us the stink eye. She wants us to wear these wizard costumes on stage when we get to L.A. and Carrie and I are like no way.”

Vic’s mother laughed. “Seems a little obvious, doesn’t it? I mean they already know you have a magical vagina.”

Jen shot her bandmate a meaningful glance, “That’s what I told her, too, Mrs. Hockman. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play a lot from the Sex Wizards album. We had talked about throwing out some of our new stuff.”

There was a scraping sound as the older woman pushed open her patio door and stepped out onto her lanai. She sighed as she plopped onto a chaise by the pool. “Well, take it easy on her. She’s my girl. You know, she does have some good ideas now and again. You have to admit that.”

Jen was unmoved. “Like calling us the Poon Mullets? Something like that good idea?”

Vic’s mom laughed until she almost choked on her black cherry and kale juice. “That one was stupid. No, dear, the Clit Rocks is much better, and such a loving homage to Eve Ensler.”

Vic snatched the phone from Jen’s hand. The drummer shrugged and closed herself in the bathroom.

“I’ve got to go, mom,” Vic said. “I don’t appreciate you and Jen using up all my minutes.”

The mother was still laughing when she ended the call. “It smells like shit in here,” Vic mumbled, rolling over and burying her face in a pillow. There was about an hour when the bus was silent. Bob, the driver, never spoke and the rest of the crew were ahead of them in the other bus. Finally Carrie – the peacekeeper – settled down next to Vic and offered to braid her hair. Humming one of their songs, she combed through the gossamer gold, occasionally finding a grey hair and pulling it out, as was their custom. Eventually, she said, “What if they were less sexy wizards, more scary – like with beards and stuff?”

Vic snorted. But then she mulled over the idea. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Jen was tilting up an empty bag of Doritos and letting the crumbs fall into her mouth. She weighed in, “What if the beards were on out tits?”

And soon they were in agreement. As the tour bus rolled into a vivid Kansas sunset, the Clit Rocks settled down to practice some harmonies with Real Housewives on the TV and the sound on mute. Bob rocked his head back and forth to their grooves and it felt like this comeback tour was going to be better than all the others.

I went with Ed to put flowers on your grave today. Two roses from the bushes we just planted. One for me and one for Ed. I thought you’d like that, something simple and beautiful earned by hard work. You showed me that in spades.

I thought about you the other day in a particular way I had not before. I thought about how you found a second passion, later in life, when you went into real estate. It was something you’d wanted to do when you were younger. You patiently met your retirement goals with NIH and then you started again, a new life in a sense. And just as you might have the first time around, you had to build from scratch, take risks, be patient, make mistakes, try again. I thought about how maybe it was hard on you waiting that long to start over again. How it must have been so tiring to your spirit.

But then, I wasn’t with you at the NIH job every day. Maybe you had a couple of work pals to cut up with; maybe you took pride in completing projects. Maybe that fed you enough, especially with dreams and future plans to mull over on the long ride home and the ride back.

I was trying to think of which of the flowers we planted to take to you. I thought of the snap dragons and then I wondered if there was metaphor lurking there. I decided not, but it did give me pause, remembering how your eyes glowed red all my childhood, abused as they were by paper work, long hours and – your constant companion – bitter allergies. You seemed tired to me so much, impatient and gruff and hard to please in the years I was little and wanting to please the most. By the time your circumstances, your mellowing age and perhaps a shift in values made you over gentler, I had become the hard one. A young man bent on his own goals, making perfunctory dinner plans, feeling I was doing my duty, thinking somewhere deep that one day it would even out. We’d meet in the middle.

In many ways, we did grow closer. I know you loved me and I know you knew I loved you. The last year of your life, when we thought you’d fooled your cancer, I found often that I had hit a button on my phone by accident. I’d look down and see your name on the screen. For a second, I’d wonder had you called me or had I called you. Caught off guard, distracted, I would give the least of myself to a quick conversation, laughing shortly that I had called by accident. I’d ask how you were and you always answered honestly, humbly, and with thought. You’d ask how I was doing. I would say fine, that work was busy, that all was normal at home.

Recently I had a client who wanted some help developing a business plan. It isn’t my expertise, but I felt like I could offer something. Like you, I’m not without ideas, not without a solid sense of logistics. I worked with a friend to help me. It came out good. Then the client’s realtor started acting cagey toward them and I wanted to ask you for advice. It hurt me so much that I couldn’t make that call. Not because of business, but because it was another reminder that all that I could make of us, I had done – in youth, arrogance, unforgiving just a little bit, cautious a mite.

I made peace with the harsher memories of being the different child in the family, the one judged for it, when I was younger. In the years that followed, you showed the kindness and the love that I wish had always been between us. And I was thankful for it. But I was also unsure of it. I stood to the side of it, giving back a lukewarm version of the same. I think time, my own age and humility, would have helped with the knitting you were casting.

I wish you had lived to be old – very old – to have felt strong and manly and capable as long as possible. It would have been great to get to be old enough in my own skin to have met you fully in the middle. It is a regret, painful to be sure, but one that I want to put to bed. It isn’t fair to think I could have done more. I did what I knew to do in those days and hours in which we were both here.

Now, in the aftermath of your death, I have been changed. I have never been short of empathy and compassion, but I now want to show some of that to myself, that I can avoid the snap dragon years. I am a sourpuss at times, eyes red like your own, tired more than my age. I would have what you found later now. I have been trying to feel more patience toward other people. I’ve been trying to let things bother me less. I cursed the garden hose this morning, fowl and guttural, and perhaps battling to become so saintly as to overcome pique at tricky, dumb things about the house is asking too much. I only want to make more room for pleasures, to ask myself if my impatience in a moment would be replaced with calm. One gentle lesson at a time, to retire bad habits of spirit early or as early as possible. I miss you, old man, in more ways than any one letter can cover. Know that I love you, miss you, and wish we could have had more of time and talk.

In the spirit of you, I am happy to set a goal of more life, love, freedom and joy in myself – a little spell to cast, pulling myself out of shadows, delusions of age, finding the sun again, the light and optimism that youth cannot help but hold easily. We who are ripening know something about optimism that youth sometimes misses: it takes tending, I’m grateful to know. You set a fine example.